Medit’s custom actions are under Preferences/Tools. There you will find a bunch of examples from which to learn, both in regular command line syntax and in more advanced scripting languages. This example is a regular command line.

I often need to trim whitespace and delete all line endings (which are left by pressing Enter) in plain text files. The command line which does it:

sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//' | tr '\n' ' '

Custom actions need a label in Medit’s Tools dialog. In this case “Trim” is fitting. Other applicable settings:

Thunar has a menu item for custom actions. It’s possible to set regular command line macros there to automatise some common repetitive tasks. For example my common repetitive task is to attach a bunch of files to an email message and I repeat the list of filenames in the email body.

Attaching a bunch of files to an email message in a graphical desktop environment is a simple drag&drop move, but the list of filenames is not that simple. It’s possible to do “copy” on the files and then “paste” in the email message body (or better in a plain text editor) which will result in a list of filenames, but this includes the full harddrive path of the directories.

The problem then is to get rid of the directory paths. It’s not too hard to do Find&Replace (text editors usually have it, more full-featured emailers also), but if the task is highly repetitive (which it is in my work), it gets tedious and an obvious need arises to automatise the task. This is something that users of Thunar can put into custom actions.

There are a few ways in which to automatise the task. Either the list of filenames could be copied to the clipboard, ready for paste, or the list can be opened up in a text editor, ready for review and further editing, if necessary. Let’s first consider copy to clipboard

List of Files onto Clipboard

From command line onto clipboard requires xclip. It needs to be installed, if it’s not already on the system. Then write this custom action:

ls -d %N | xclip -selection c

Additionally you can set an icon to the custom action, so you will find it easier later in the Thunar menu. This done and applied, when you select multiple files in Thunar (I usually select everything in a folder) and choose the action, the list of filenames will be on clipboard – without directory paths – ready for paste.

List of Files into Editor

Copy to clipboard is a kind of hidden action. If you are not good at remembering or checking what you last copied, then a more visible action may be in order. The list of filenames can be automatically opened up in a text editor, so you see the result of the action.

The problem here is that not every editor allows straightforward piping. The only one I found that does this is Leafpad. I am open to suggestions how other editors accept external input. With Leafpad, it works like this:

ls -d %N | leafpad

With every other editor, a possible solution is to output the list of filenames as a text file and then open the text file:

ls -d %N > filelist.txt && {editor} filelist.txt

where {editor} is to be replaced with the name of the text editor. This is coarse and unelegant, but the file can be deleted by the end of the operation:

ls -d %N > filelist.txt && {editor} filelist.txt && rm filelist.txt

This will remove the text file as soon as the editor is closed.

PCLOS Mag has a more extensive tutorial complete with examples of scripts and Zenity prompts http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201308/page02.html

Network Manager (or networkmanager) is a comfortable GUI app to switch between internet connections in Linux. The more recent versions of it seem to misbehave more and more, in my experience failing mainly with older Android modems. Here’s a workaround that may help.

The workaround requires dhcp as described at Manjarowiki, but the instructions are a bit different.

Determine the devices: ls /sys/class/net This gives you normally three devices on computer to connect to internet: wifi, ethernet, and something called lo.

Connect the Android phone, switch it to make modem, and see if it Network Manager fails. If it fails, move on to the next step.

Determine the devices again: ls /sys/class/net This time it should list four devices. The fourth is your modem. It’s the one to go for with dhcp.

As root, type dhcpcd enp* where enp* should be completed as your fourth device appeared in the previous step.

Now there should be internet 🙂

The Manjarowiki instructions also include a step how to make the device permanent in systemd across reboots, but this is not feasible with mobile phone modem, as it sometimes gets differently assigned. The enp* identifier will be different, so it cannot be made permanent.

Otter browser is a project to re-create Opera browser interface, as it stood during Presto era. (Nowadays Opera has moved on to the uninteresting Blink era and lost its unique interface.)

Otter browser builds interface with Qt5 and renders with Webkit. The development has had a fast pace. The plans look moderately ambitious, i.e. achievable. In weekly 46 release, these Opera-like elements have been re-created:

The adress field is still not quite uptodate with suggestions et al., but at this stage I’d call Otter generally usable, particularly because of good cookie support. It’s usable as a general purpose browser, and it’s a joy to follow its development.

Most easily installable packages are available for Arch Linux and Windows. In other distros and opsyses you will have to hunt for Qt dependencies in order to get Otter installed.

Set two stylesheets in position. Edit the file paths in the script accordingly. Save the script in ~/.config/dwb/userscripts/ and make it executable. Restart the browser. If everything went right, then xg keys will be switching between your two stylesheets.

The problem you will notice is that there’s no way back to the author-set stylesheets after you switched to user stylesheets. This is precisely where duplicate tab comes in handy. Duplicate tab will open up the same address in a new tab and reload author stylesheets.

It’s cool to have a transparent background in your console-based web browser, such as Elinks or Lynx. Depending on your desktop image and text colours, the result may become illegible, unusable and detrimental to the eyes, but visually stunning awesomeness is guaranteed in any case.

HOW TO TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND IN ELINKS

There are several spins and versions of Elinks, so the simple tweaks I list here may not work for everyone. When I was researching how to achieve background transparency, the tutorials on the web suggested recompiling with certain options. However, for me, with version 0.13.GIT (obtained from Arch User Repository), all I needed was these entries in elinks.conf:

This means that attempts to use webpage CSS has to be switched off and the black background (most usable option normally) has to be commented out, if it’s in use.

Then make Elinks acknowledge the transparency of the terminal under Options / Terminals / *terminal name* / transparency. Set transparency to “1”. This will result in something like this in elinks.conf:

set terminal.xterm-color.transparency = 1

Now try it out 🙂

HOW TO TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND IN LYNX

Lynx’s functionality is also severely dependent on the precise version. Mine is 2.8.9dev.1, which is the most uptodate at the moment of writing. In some distros the latest version goes under the name lynx-cur or lynx-current.

Look for the file /etc/lynx.lss

Either copy the file to your user directory under some workable name to modify it as user or modify the original file as root.

In the file, find these rows:

normal: normal: lightgray:black default: normal: white:black

And comment them out:

#normal: normal: lightgray:black #default: normal: white:black

Start Lynx with lynx -lss path-to-the-modified-lynx.lss

Note: If you chose to modify the original /etc/lynx.lss, it will be overwritten when the next Lynx update arrives.

/tmp is a system section that is rather active. Temporary downloads get directed there. Package manager (system updater) works through it. Building packages, if not specifically directed elsewhere, also works through the same section.

Why mount /tmp to RAM?

If your hardware uses SSD instead of HDD, you may want to reduce disk activity as SSD is sensitive to it and supposedly gets worn out easily. Reduced number of disk writes can be achieved by mounting /tmp to RAM. There are instructions on the net how to do it.

However, systems built around systemd may already direct /tmp to RAM out of the box. I don’t know if all systemd distros do this, but Manjaro does. More specifically, systemd treats /tmp as tmpfs, which means /tmp is directed both to RAM and swap.

Why not mount /tmp to RAM?

Allowing /tmp to operate in RAM is desirable, if the system disk is an SSD instead of HDD. But when you use HDD, which is more likely, and you compile source into packages every once in a while with relatively limited RAM, then it’s more desirable to have /tmp operate on the disk rather than in RAM. When you compile code into packages and RAM runs out of space, you will get an error.

There are plenty of tutorials on the internet to get Thunderbird mailer to display images in emails, even though this is obvious: Press Show Remote Content. This post is about how to never see the warning again.

Seamonkey is a sane mailer. It displays the same kind of warning, but with two options, either to allow remote content or never warn about it again (and never show the content either). Thunderbird, however, has been sanitised towards insanity, so it only displays Show Remote Content button, but doesn’t seem to offer a way to get rid of the ugly button altogether.

Here’s how: Open Preferences –> Advanced –> General and find about:config. There, find the setting mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image. Set this to false. Done.

(Here’s the official intro to Manjaro Netbook Edition https://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=7319.0)

My screen of Manjaro Netbook Edition after a weekend of tweaking:

Comparison with Manjaro Openbox Edition a.k.a. Manjarobox

LOGIN MANAGER

The login manager is MDM, known from Linux Mint. In my opinion it’s too heavy for netbooks. In Manjarobox you get Slim, which is much more appropriate. This was the first thing I changed to reflect Manjarobox after I installed the Netbook Edition.

DESKTOP

Manjarobox features Openbox, which is a light desktop. Light basically means that there are no desktop icons and the apps menu opens with right-click on the desktop, instead of having a dedicated taskbar button. Still, for example the invaluable systray is there.

In comparison, Netbook Edition features Xfce, a full-featured desktop environment, but with some important alterations specific to Netbook Edition. In normal Xfce you expect desktop icons. These are not available in Netbook Edition. The rest is pretty much there, even the new feature of window snapping-and-tiling-by dragging. (In Manjarobox this last functionality is available with keyboard shortcuts after some hacking.)

The most visible departure from the usual Xfce is the central taskbar in Netbook Edition. The central taskbar is replaced with DockbarX. The taskbar in normal Xfce behaves like in XP, whereas DockbarX always iconifies the open apps. When hovering the mouse pointer above the icon in DockbarX, you see the list of open windows with an opportunity to switch to them or close them with precision. Right-click on the icon provides you with some actions, such as pin, (un)maximise, and close the application – Win 7 style.

There’s a unique default behaviour configured into Netbook Edition’s desktop environment: Apps start up with maximised window. I was wary of this behaviour at first. This was one of the reasons why I didn’t try Netbook Edition on my netbook sooner. However, now I have seen it in action and it seems that this behaviour makes kind of sense in netbooks.

Some oddities occur due to this maximisation behaviour, for example when you copy files in Thunar, a full-screen progress window pops up instead of a small progress bar. Still, by default you have the well-considered unmaximise button on the taskbar. It’s also possible to easily configure a keyboard shortcut to toggle window maximisation in Xfce, so in the end this is not a problem. It’s a feature.

CHOICE OF APPLICATIONS

Compared to Manjarobox 0.8.8 which was very minimalistic, Netbook Edition comes with more apps, such as Midori browser (versus no browser in Manjarobox 0.8.8), Xfburn (I don’t know why this is here; how many netbooks have a DVDRW drive?), Audacious, VLC.

I liked the lack of apps in Manjarobox better. Manjarobox 0.8.8 even lacked the graphical applications manager (Pamac in Manjaro), so that you had to know the command-line way of adding apps at first. To compensate, Manjarobox comes with some important installation scripts in the apps menu – menu items to install the graphical applications manager, office software, printers’ drivers, multimedia codecs, and more.

Manjarobox’s installation scripts is something that is in turn missing in Netbook Edition and this is a serious miss in my opinion, because, for example, even though some multimedia apps are there in Netbook Edition out of the box, not all codecs are there.

SOME PERSONAL STUFF

In my screenshot above there are some visible additions to the default selection of apps in Netbook Edition:

Artha (the Wordnet dictionary with some added features)

Seamonkey

Skype

Otter browser (the pointer icon in the centre of the taskbar; Otter browser does not really have an icon, but this is how I made it to look like for now)

Xfce goodies, such as the CPU graph and Clipman; this is another miss in the default selection of apps in Netbook Edition in my opinion. To me, these goodies are inseparable from Xfce.

THE BEST IN NETBOOK EDITION

In comparison with Manjarobox, the screen lock and suspend at lid-close is configured properly out of the box. This how it should be in any OS version specifically catering to laptops and similar.

For this edition, the developers have optimised the kernel (for the i686 architecture version; Netbook Edition with x86_64 architecture doesn’t have this). I am too dumb to understand the benefits of the optimised kernel, but there’s more: Also Flash plugin, which I thought inappropriate for my netbook and I didn’t even try in Manjarobox, is specifically optimised and works like a snap in all browsers!

Now, disappointingly again, these optimised packages – linux312-netbook and flashplugin-netbook – don’t seem to be readily available in the repositories. Manjarobox users would really appreciate them.

I am a Skype user, so a remark on this too. In Manjarobox, Skype tended to crash in the middle of some kinda hot webcam sessions. Without much research I thought it can be blamed on hardware weakness. Now on Manjaro Netbook Edition these crashes do not occur. Either I got lucky or something’s truly optimised here 🙂

CONCLUSION

All-in-all, there are some important things in this edition that make it worth trying, such as the optimised Flash plugin and considerately pre-configured lid-close. The misses are minor and easily remedied. If you have a netbook and some experience with Manjaro, give it a try.

My netbook has 1 GB RAM and Intel Atom CPU N450 (-HT-) clocked at Min:1000.000Mhz Max:1666.000Mhz. Netbook Edition’s Xfce desktop works here almost as snappy as Openbox that I tried earlier. I was perfectly satisfied with Openbox, but I like some of the added functionality in Netbook Edition, such as the window tiling by dragging, and I have learned to like the auto-maximised windows. With less RAM and weaker CPU however, Openbox would still be a smarter choice considering the resources.